I code in PHP for my day job. There's almost nothing I can't do in PHP. Millions of people use my PHP code. I also know several other languages, so I have some basis of comparison to say PHP 5.0 kinda sucked as a general purpose programming language, and I can tell you exactly WHY it sucked.

PHP was originally a blog / CMS script written in Perl. It was designed to be a blog, not language for general programming. In fact, it wasn't even supposed to be used by programmers at all. It was designed for webmasters who didn't know Perl and didn't want to learn. Up through version 4, it's roots were painfully obvious. Lerdorf has said "I know nothing about language design ", and he's right. Fortunately, he hired some people who do have a clue for the 5.4 versions, so it's getting better.

Well, then pretty soon those people so lacking in self control will do all their acting behind bars.

That's a tough question.

No kidding. One of the scariest quotes of the article: "42 per cent of Canadians are able to read and understand newspaper stories detailing scientific findings."

The scary part is Canada is ahead of everyone else on that stat. Newspaper stories are not exactly deep in scientific detail and hard-to-understand words.

You just don't hear about the humans who aren't attention seekers, because......they aren't seeking attention. I think this is somewhat obvious?

FTFY.

True, but still an utter red herring.

I understand that the first interview is conducted over the phone or Skype (I have both) and the second in person. Do candidates commonly ride Greyhound to and from this second interview? Or should candidates expect to endure the sexual overtones of U.S. airport security theater such as Rapiscan and enhanced patdowns?

Currently I use a bicycle in a (probably different) midwestern town to commute to and from the office where I work as a web application programmer.

How many CVE fixes do you get in your typical web browser, or should I say client-side JavaScript language system?

How are mbstring and iconv not Unicode? Is it just that a byte order mark inserted by Windows Notepad will cause headers to be sent?

I blame shared hosting providers that include PHP support in the cheapest package but require an upgrade (at additional cost per month) for any other server-side language.

And guess where Red Hat Enterprise Linux stopped. The only things they backport from new versions are the security fixes.

I missed this in preview:

This should be "knees left uncovered by modest shorts"

That explains it. Thank you.

At least Mormonism and Islam teach this minimum standard of modesty in order to ensure that the shape of one's privates remains covered so as to divert attention from sex. I guess knees covered by modest shorts (not Daisy Dukes though) are fine.

Please don't be silly. I was asking a question, not prescribing what one should do. If this were a Stack Exchange site, I'd accept serviscope_minor's answer.